Day: October 2, 2011

Amazon remade its Kindle edition of Neal Stephenson’s new novel Reamde, and is now getting reamed by disgruntled readers, GalleyCat and CNet report. The e-book had been pulled from the Kindle store on Tuesday, and today customers who had bought it received a cryptic (and ungrammatical) email from Amazon advising them that “the version you received had Missing Content that have (sic) been corrected.”

The manner in which this correction was applied has upset customers such as Cynthia Ewer, who was 400 pages into the over-1,000-page novel, or cdale77 who was 500 pages in. They were not upset at obvious typos in the book that they found so much as they were put out by Amazon’s high-handed notification that told them there had been “Missing Content” but gave them no idea exactly what or where that “Missing Content” was. (Even Amazon’s phone support people couldn’t say.) Also, the replacement wiped out any highlights, bookmarks, and notes made in the previous version, as well as the place-keeping bookmark noting the furthest location read.

One reader produced text copies of both the old and new versions (undoubtedly having to crack DRM illegally to do so) and ran them through the diff comparison tool to find out what had been changed, and it turned out that the changes were not major: a few missing words here and there had been corrected, the spelling of the cover artist’s name had been fixed—and in one case, a new typo was introduced!

I bought the print version of Reamde. Amazon has yet to sneak into my house to replace it.

What’s in a name…for your favored hunting camp? In the case of Texas Governor Rick Perry, it could be a bit of lingering racism.

Gov. Perry’s campaign is pushing back today against a story in the Washington Post today about his West Texas hunting camp where the governor has hosted lawmakers and friends, which for many years was called “Niggerhead.”

The name, painted for many years on a large rock sitting at the entrance to the 1072-acre property, was reportedly used for the area near Clear Fork on the Brazos River which the Perry family has used for hunting since the early 1980s. But the painted rock, and the name of the area, remained long after Perry and his father began using the area for hunting trips with friends.